Bill Gates on climate tech start-ups: Many of them will fail, but only 'a few dozen' need to succeed

Bill Gates is excited about how many new climate tech start-ups have popped up in recent years. He also thinks that plenty of them won't last.

"The number of companies working on these things is very exciting," Gates said on Wednesday, in a virtual session of the World Economic Forum. "Some of them will fail. A lot of them will fail. But we only need a reasonable number, a few dozen of them, to make it through and that's what we have to accelerate."

Deep-pocketed investors have poured money into the climate tech industry in recent years. More than 3,000 climate tech start-ups launched between 2013 and the first half of 2021, with more than $222 billion in funding in that same time span, according to research published by PwC in December.

Gates, currently the fourth-wealthiest person in the world, is one of those investors: His private-public fund Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is currently raising up to $15 billion for clean tech projects. And he's seemingly fine with many of those projects eventually going under — because, he said, it could only take a few dozen success stories to make a significant contribution in the fight against climate change.